Category Archives: Funding

Funding, Management

The one question you need to ask VC’s in #India to understand how quickly they will move to fund your #startup?

I was in Bangalore for 3 days, meeting about 30 entrepreneurs on day 2 and about 50 earlier stage in-the-process-of-starting-a-company entrepreneurs. The first thing that strikes you is how amazingly vibrant the ecosystem in Bangalore is. I met with over 100 investors (angel as well as a few VC’s) as well at the Lets Venture event and they while many were complaining that “valuations are higher” and “entrepreneurs are pushing them to make decisions quicker”, they were very upbeat about the opportunity in the Bangalore ecosystem.

The entrepreneurs are also much more savvy than folks were even about a year ago (I know that I spoke with a curated list, but previous curated lists were provided as well and this cohort of entrepreneurs were far ahead of those a few years ago).

The most interesting part that I noticed was that there was a bigger focus on “traction“.

I can confidently say that having been to 23 cities in the last 6 months including New York, Beijing, San Francisco and other cities in the US, Bangalore has a clear shot at being in the elite “top 5” entrepreneur ecosystems (Of course it will be Silicon Valley (Snow White) which will be #1 by a wide margin, but the other cities (the 7 dwarfs) are doing well relatively. I look at ecosystems for entrepreneurs around cities more than countries.

That optimism also bears itself out in the numbers. From look at IVCA funding and other locations, Bangalore is trending stronger than other cities such as Seattle, New York or Austin.

There were many observations I had in my 3-5 indepth discussions with Venture Capital investors in India. One of them was their necessity to now “compete” to get entrepreneurs’s attention.

Which in itself indicates a strong and vibrant startup funding ecosystem.

The most important takeaway for you as an entrepreneur, that I have learned is this –

If a venture firm has spent any time forming an “investment thesis” in a particular market or segment, then they will move much quicker than other firms who have not.

So that’s the million dollar question you can ask to determine if a VC will move quickly in India. I know this is the case in other locations as well, but the funding frenzy has been more acute in Bangalore than I have seen before.

I would ask a variation of the question – “What is your investment thesis in XYZ market”? Or “Do you have an investment thesis on “my XYZ” market”?

if they do, then your job is only to convince them that you are the best team, company and startup with the right traction to invest in.

If not, they will take weeks to understand the lay of the land, look at competitors and then form an opinion on your market.

Let me know if this works.

Entrepreneurship, Funding, Learning

10 things I have learned from running 10 demo days about #startup pitches

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Ahh, the demo day. The arbitrary day the accelerator decides it is time to throw its babies to the world of investors. The number of accelerator directors I have asked the question “why is your program 3 or 4 months” is probably in the 50’s and the number of times I have not heard a thoughtful response is 100%. It is almost as if “that’s what everyone else does”.

This post though is not about being cynical, but more about what I have learned over the years and on what entrepreneurs can gain from my experiences of managing and running 12 demo days and helping close to 150 companies pitch, position and excite audiences.

First, it is important to set context. I am assuming you have a mix of investors and some non investors as well at your demo day. You have been through a 3-4 month program and have been practicing your “pitch” for a few months once or twice a month at least. I am also assuming that your pitch is about 3-5 minutes and your goal is to get investors interested enough to setup a follow on meeting to understand your company in more detail to express interest in investing.

I know that YC demo days have people in a frenzy with some investors texting they are “in” a round, even before the entrepreneur finishes their pitch, but for most parts I am going to assume that’s a rarity. For the rest of us, mere mortals, the pitch is an opportunity to prevent the audience from going to their smartphones distracted or otherwise bored by listening to pitch after pitch.

Here are the 10 things I have learned, in no particular order.

1. Show energy and passion – always be selling

You are in the spotlight, so if you dont wear your passion on your sleeve, you will likely get no attention. Even if you are a mellow person and tend not get excited much, find a way to show as much excitement you can about your company, the market and the opportunity. Investors are judging you and if “you dont seem excited about the opportunity”, they dont believe they should be either. You have been given an opportunity to sell your vision and this is one of the biggest opportunities you can get.
2. Visuals are only a prop – You should be able to tell your story without slides as well

Things have gone wrong with the deck or the projector only 2 times during the entire demo day for the 10 times we have done them, but those 2 times resulted in a meltdown for our founders. They were among the best in the cohort, but they forgot their pitch, got distracted and flustered when their slides went “blank”. Investors went believing that if they were to react this way if their pitch went dark, how would they react when sh*t hits the fan at their startup. Be cool. Use the Pitch deck as a prop alone.
3. Your goal is to a) get people’s interest to have a follow on discussion and b) to prevent them from getting distracted by their smart phones and c) ensure you are memorable enough for them to “tweet” about it, or make a note to email you for a follow up meeting

Dont imagine that someone will walk up after the pitch and give you a check. That would set you up for a high bar in terms of goal for your demo day pitch. You only goal should be to be memorable enough to get a follow on meeting.

4. Show traction – quickly after the problem and solution

Traction trumps all evils in a startup. Not a complete team, but have great traction – the investors think they can help you build the management team. Market sizing is still relatively small – the investors will try and help you expand to adjacent markets. But no traction? You cannot manufacture that.

5. Be specific about the total market, and addressable market

Most entrepreneurs have the time to only show the largest number possible and hope investors bite. Be more thoughtful than that. Over 60% of the folks that “went one level deeper” about addressable market, I have found, got a follow on meeting. The ones that showed a large gazillion dollar market, found investors ignored that number largely.

6. Tell stories that your day in the life has shown you, avoiding using phrases like – big problem, painful, etc.

If you generically use statements like “the problem is massive” for our customers, without being specific about the pain points, you are likely going to be dismissed. I’d highly recommend you use your “day in the life” scenarios to showcase what your user actually goes through as problems and how they are handling this right now.

7. Answer the question – why are you the best team to execute this problem

Many investors will tell you they invested only because they felt this was a great team and nothing else. That’s a lie. A big lie, but nonetheless, the team is one of the most critical aspects of any software opportunity. Just telling the audience who is in your team and letting them make the inferences as to why the team is uniquely suited to execute this problem is poor judgement on your part. Ensure that you let them know about your experiences, the fact that you have worked together, or that you have each unique learning that together helps build a great company.

8. Be clear about why and how you are different

In the absence of having something different to say, most customers (and investors) assume you dont have anything different, so you will compete on price. Competing on price is okay, but that usually signals a race to the bottom. The important thing I have learned about differentiation is that you have do something different in all aspects of your pitch – why is your team different, why is your product different, why is the market you are targeting different, why is your go-to-market different etc.

9. Your positioning forces people to figure out quickly if they are interested – get it right.

The first single line positioning is the thing almost everyone will listen to, which should be 5-15 seconds, when they are deciding if your pitch is worth listening to. Get it right and do it by A/B testing your startup’s positioning over time. Tweet-ready positioning is the best way to get some attention from the audience online.
10. Work your audience – Focus, 10 sec pause, Connect, Sweep 2 sec, Repeat. Make eye contact with as many people as possible. Engage your audience with a rhetorical question if you can.

These are tips for the folks that want to be a better public speaker. If your accelerator offers an opportunity to avail the services of a pitch coach, use it. As often as you can. While it wont make or break your company, the best public speakers generate more interest (not necessarily better, but more) for their companies than the ones who “show up and throw up”.

Entrepreneurship, Funding

How to present the market slide on your Overview presentation at demo day?

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Most investors and others who attend the demo day dismiss the “our market is very large Gazillion dollars” hype that startups state in their size of market slide. Since the size of market is part of the 3 step process to raise capital from institutional investors, spending enough time on documenting the assumptions you have made are important, as well as having a believable set of numbers to back up your claims.

In their quest to ensure that they are excited about how large it is, most entrepreneurs only do a top-down market analysis and usually mistake total market size with addressable market. For example, if your app helps teenagers communicate with each other using only animal pictures, then technically all teenagers are your target market. Realistically, if you factor in the # of teenagers who have cell phones with good camera, who have reliable Internet connection and then those that like animals it is likely to be much smaller.

If you market is small, it is small. No amount of you trying to make it big is going to make you look credible.

There are 2 types of audiences you are trying to convey to and 3 most important things you need to articulate about your market.

The audience that knows the market and instinctively knows it is big. These are the “insiders” who have been following many other startups in the same market and understand either unmet needs or displacement opportunities.

The second audience (the larger set) that does not know the market at all and needs to see a clear breakdown of total market size, immediate opportunity and complete potential.

The market slides you put together in your overview deck, is aimed more at the 2nd audience than the first one. The insiders only need to know that you have thought through the size of market.

For the uninitiated, you need to keep in mind.

1. You have credibly broken down the “large” market into addressable chunks and have a credible process by which you came up with the market size.

2. Walk your audience through your thinking process on how you came up with the size of your market to gain their appreciation for your understanding of the space.

3. Cite as many good dependable sources in your market slide to show that you have done a good landscape map of your market.

I would highly recommend you do both a top down, as well as a bottoms-up analysis to come to your market size.

Here are 3 market slides from companies I have seen. The first one from Tealet is pretty poor, the one from Mattermark is better, but the one from Square is the best.

Square Market SlideMattermark Market Slide

Tealet Market Slide

If you were presenting in front of a large audience, I would use the Mattermark slide – large size fonts. If you are making a market size slide for the operating plan deck, I’d use the Square format. If you were looking to put a slide on Angel.co for your profile, I’d use the Tealet approach.

Funding, Tips

Why you need 3 presentations (with increasing depth) to land investment post your seed round

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The 3 step process to raising money post your seed has

a) an overview step – usually at a demo day (3-5 min presentation) or via a warm introduction followed by

b) a first meeting (30 – 60 min) where your pitch deck showcases your company and business and finally

c) a follow on second meeting (60-90 min) with partners at the firm where you outline your operating plan

Your overview presentations’ goal is to pique interest in 5-7 slides and generate enough excitement to warrant a follow on meeting

The pitch deck’s purpose in 12-15 slides is to give enough visibility into your business to help potential investors understand it.

The operating plan’s purpose in 15-25 slides is to share the details of how you plan to invest the raised capital to get to the milestones that will make your company succeed.

Over the next few days I will take each slide deck and share some of my experiences with examples.

Let us first take the overview deck. This is typically given at your demo day or when you have 3-5 minutes alone to pitch, instead of 30 minutes (when you will need your pitch deck)

Your should cover 5-7 key areas and here is what I recommend:

1. Your single line positioning, company name, founder’s email and angel.co profile address.

E.g.

1. Get Magic Now – Text this number to get what you want with no hassles

2. Seed.co – Modern business banking without branches

3. Get Meadow – Buy medical marijuana for delivery today.

The positioning is different from your tag line, which focuses more on being memorable and different about how you do something as opposed to what you do.

Here is how I think about positioning: Try to address in one word who your customer is, another word for what you do for them and third word for how you do it differently

2. The problem you solve (and focus on the customer specifically) – be as specific as possible, and show how customers are currently solving that problem. Here are some tips on presenting your problem slide.

3. Your solution & how is it different – use screen shots to show your product if you wish

4. Size of your market – total and addressable market size is preferred. Here are some tips on presenting your market slide.

5. Traction – be as specific as possible either in terms of users, revenue, or other metric you are tracking. # of meetings with customers or discussions with prospects is not traction. Here are some tips on presenting the traction slide.

6. Team – answer why you are uniquely positioned to execute this opportunity

7. Call to action – Dont say we invite you to talk to us. Ask for folks to download, or ask them to tweet for early access, etc.

Over the next few days I will outline each of these slides with examples.

Entrepreneurship, Funding

Founders make good money when a VC funded company exits very rarely

Dragons:

A dragon is a company that returns an entire fund — a “fund maker.” VCs can have dragons in their portfolios just as LPs can have dragons in their portfolios.

Unicorns:

Many entrepreneurs, and the venture investors who back them, seek to build billion-dollar companies.

Decacorns:

Billion-dollar companies join a club of “unicorns,” a term used to explain how rare they are. But there are more than 50 of them now. There’s a new buzzword, “decacorn,” for those over $10 billion

Cartazonos:

The company where founders make significant money as well as investors.

According to Wikipedia: 

Unicorns are not found in Greek mythology, but rather in accounts of natural history, for Greek writers of natural history were convinced of the reality of the unicorn, which they located in India, a distant and fabulous realm for them.

The growing number of startups with unicorn valuations is leading many entrepreneurs to believe that they will be billionaires when their startup realizes the $Billion valuation externally, or when they get an “exit”.

Turns out the only time the founders get an exit that’s worth the effort is when all the stars align.

Here are 3 examples of good, bad and ugly.

1. Good: Cloudera’s funding resulted in founders (4) worth more than $250 Million in paper.

2. Bad: The cautionary tale of RedBus acquisition for employees and everyone but the founders.

3. Ugly: Get Satisfaction gets acquired by Sprinkr for < $50 Million after raising about $20 Million so far and the founders get washed out.

Gives you pause on the “headline” announcement for the huge fund raising that companies do.

If you are a founder and are looking to hit pay dirt, you will do that only when the exit is aligned with investor interests after their liquidation preferences and return restrictions.

 

Entrepreneurship, Funding

What drives early stage valuation multiples of tech #startups?

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Almost every company I have talked to in the last 2 weeks ( total of about 12 startups) has a question around valuation multiples they should expect for their company. While many are concerned about dilution and loss of control, I think the bigger worry should be the high bar of flawless execution priced into valuations.

Basically the way it works is that the higher the valuation multiple (to your revenue, forward-looking growth or execution to date), the less room you have for errors. The higher the valuation, the more flawless your execution needs to be. Else you will be either replaced as the founding CEO, or face a lower valuation in your next round (called down round, and cause cramming).

I had a chance to talk to about 20 founders who recently raised money in the last 5 weeks. All of them, except 3 have raised money in the US, and of the remaining 18-19, 7 have raised money outside the Silicon Valley.

Most investors (seed or institutional) are always looking for a “low” valuation. Few may be looking for a “fair” valuation at the early stage. Often, it is impossible to determine what the valuation of a company is or how much the multiple on their metrics should be.

The “easier” (relatively speaking) valuation multiples are determined on your revenue, if you have any, profit (still rare) or other metrics that you can sell your investors on (e.g. user growth in the case of social networks for example, when you are not yet making money).

The tougher “nice to have” valuation multiples are on the management team, market size, etc. These negotiations are always harder than those on metrics.

So what metrics matter? According to the 20 folks I spoke with, they all fell into – revenue, expected growth (what the investors believed they would be in 12, 18 or 24 months) and growth to date (execution).

Step 1: The range of the valuation multiple would be determined for most of these by an arbitrary “market size” number and many quoted “angel list” averages as a good starting point.

Step 2: Then the investors would dive into their current revenues (12 of the companies are making some money). The range for multiple of revenue ranged from 5 X (in India) to 30X (at the high end, Silicon Valley, YC company). Interesting that non of my surveyed companies had more than 30X multiple on their valuation, even though, I have heard via anecdotal evidence again, that there companies getting more.

Step 3: The startup then goes through an exercise of growth projections, and obviously, the higher the growth, the more the valuation multiple. The best way to think about this is via a rule of thumb – for every 10 additional percentage points in growth month-on-month, folks are asking for a 1.1X increase in valuation multiple. So someone growing at 20% M-o-M is asking for 2.2X increase in their multiple, above and beyond their revenue multiple.]

Step 4: Looking at past revenue growth, over the last 6-12 months (if applicable). Many founders are pointing to the past growth purely as a sign of good execution, but not an indicator of future growth numbers. Most founders I talked to believe they will grow faster with the money than without, which the investors discount, since they believe they are providing that fuel.

Step 5: Finally, most cited the use of a well rounded management team and recent competitive “whisper numbers” around startups in the same “space” as benchmark metrics for valuation multiples.

I must caution that most of this is anecdotal and not very scientific, but a good rule of thumb.

What I am telling the entrepreneurs at our accelerators is to make sure they factor in “average” valuation multiples for their projections, but execute so they can get the best.

I’d love your input if you have recently raised money. Let me know in your comments if you’d like to have a discussion (via email or on Slack is preferred).

Entrepreneurship, Funding

Who should you raise money for your #startup from if you had a choice?

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I got a question from a friend Abhinav Sahai, as a follow up to my post “Does who you raise money from limit or grow the size of your ambition?”

What are the parameters that one should look at when choosing ‘who’ to raise money from? 

I am going to give you the easy answer first to the question. This is based on my observation that most entrepreneurs find it extremely hard to raise money for any number of reasons – positioning, not being in the network, not having sufficient traction, etc.

The answer is “Whoever is willing to give it to you”.

For over 80% of entrepreneurs that answer should be sufficient, unfortunately.

Lets assume though that you are in a position to receive interest from multiple investors and you have to make a choice. Or you are going about your fund raise in a strategic fashion and are looking to target specific investors who you’d like to bring on board at your startup.

The overarching theme to address this question is to bring folks who provide “Smart Capital“.

Most investors will give you money. That’s why they are an investor.

What you need in addition to the capital is what you should be looking to get from investors if you have the choice.

1. In some cases that might be connections and networks – to other investors, to potential customers, partners or future employees.

2. In other cases it might be expertise and insights – how to address questions that you will face while you scale and grow your startup.

3. In still other cases it  might be credibility and advice – being associated with top folks in your industry gives you a leg up over others.

4. In still other cases you might just want someone you can trust and sound ideas off. Knowing that your startup journey is going to be long and lonely means you need folks to help keep your morale up or to help you gain perspective.

They may be more things you might need in addition to capital, but most will fall into these 3-4 buckets.

Typically most folks will tell you that they can bring their expertise and connections. 

If you can be strategic about your fund raising (meaning you have good runway, or have great traction), then I’d highly recommend you look at your fundraising as a project that the CEO undertakes herself.

It will take about 3-6 months (elapsed time) from start to finish, so you should be willing to be patient, and consistently follow up as with any strategic project.

So the question then becomes how do you gauge if someone has expertise or connections?

The simple test is to ask them questions you face daily and look for depth of the answers, the breadth of their knowledge and the ability for them to customize their learning to your needs. That will give you a sense for their expertise.

The depth and breadth of their network is also easy to test – ask them to introduce you to 2-3 people you have been trying to meet to help validate your plan.

Above all I’d highly recommend you reference check. Talk to others in their network who they have invested with or other entrepreneurs they have invested in to get a sense for the investor.

The most critical question you can ask is how they respond to tough situations. 

100% of all startups go to hell and back before they are a success or a failure. When you have supportive investors to help you along the hard journey, it will be a lot less stressful.

Funding

Does who you raise money from limit or grow the size of your ambition?

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I was speaking to a prominent angel investors in the Seattle ecosystem yesterday. He has been pretty prolific, doing over 20 deals in the last 5 years. He does mostly syndicates and has a band of investors he works with. Having been a successful technology executive before, he understands the market and the landscape fairly well.

We got talking about accelerators and their place in the startup food chain.

Most VC’s and angels will tell you that in the last 2-3 years, accelerator backed companies have gone from 0 to about 5-10% of their portfolio. Many seed (angel, individual) investors still believe that proprietary deal flow is critical to their success in building a strong portfolio.

The thing that struck me was how he mentioned that in the last year he has changed his position from “angel investor education” to “entrepreneur education”.

The reason was that he felt entrepreneurs were not clear on the market landscape for exits and how angel investors need to make money as well. I can understand and empathize. If angel investors don’t make money, they wont be able to convince other new investors to come along.

He was talking about the example where most of his companies (of the ones that exited) have been acquired for between $25 and $100 Million. He has 4 exits, so there’s clearly insufficient data to form a trend.

Nonetheless, he felt it was important to ensure that entrepreneurs understand that the series A VC round was getting bigger and getting harder, so he was pushing for his entrepreneurs to be capital efficient and raise as little as possible, expecting to raise < $3 million ($500K – $1Mill, first seed, followed by a < $2M post seed). That way he felt, that a < $10 Million valuation in your post seed will still get you a 2 – 5X multiple return.

Normally I would have filed this under “investor that cares about returns only so don’t bother”, but this investor is really smart and has been helping his entrepreneurs successfully raise their follow-on’s. Of the 20+ companies, he has helped 80% of them raise follow on funding within 18 months. Pretty impressive.

Then it struck me as I was speaking to a valley VC later in the evening, who mentioned there was “frothiness” in the valley and that companies were raising money because everything is just so much more expensive. He was advocating the “Go big or Go home” strategy.

Turns out there are multiple options indeed for entrepreneurs – if you can get to the valley, and plug into the network, you tend to raise a lot more money, grow big and scale fast.

If you are not in the valley, you grow slower.

I have a few questions though:

1. Do you know what drives you – making good money or making a difference? – Saying both is an easy cop out. What would you prioritize?

2. Does the size of your ambition affect who you raise money from and where?

3. Does who you raise money from (not the amount) affect the size of your outcome as well?

I suspect the answer to all these questions is a qualified yes. I’d love your 1-2 sentence answer (or 140 character tweet) to these questions.

Funding

How “Clustering Illusion” stalls more #startups than any other bias

When you are doing your initial customer development, by talking to many potential users, there are many cognitive biases you need to be aware of.

Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment.

Usually most founders tend to solve problems they have exposure to or those they are aware of, or those they believe to be one that’s a large market. This stems from the “scratch your own itch” phenomenon.

I had a conversation with a founder who is building a consumer internet company, where viral effects of her product determine the growth trajectory more than any other metric. Or so, she had learned from many other founders experiences – both by talking to them and investors in the space.

After 3 months of building her mobile eCommerce product, she and her cofounder launched it in the marketplace. Initial traction was good and trending ahead of their expectations. Many of the early users were impressed with their product selection and merchandise.

Growth after the 4th month though, stalled as they were on the road trying to raise their initial funding. Most every entrepreneur knows that fund raising can be a full time job. In fact I have mentioned several times that fundraising is a poker game more than chess.

When they were trying to show their initial user growth, many investors had the same problem – was their product a trendy, 3-month-uptick or a sustainable-fast-growth business?

After hearing this from the 5th seed investor, they determined that they need to look closer at their numbers, their repeat purchase behavior and address the issue before they were going to raise any funding.

Looking at the initial numbers suggested their they had many buyers who got to know about them through word-of-mouth, and the repeat purchase was high.

She and her cofounder determined that they had to improve their virality coefficient.

This is the bias I see most often: clustering illusion.

The clustering illusion is the tendency to erroneously consider the inevitable “streaks” or “clusters” arising in small samples from random distributions to be statistically significant.

When you have very little data, you have very little data. That’s it.

Don’t make assumptions about the overall market based on very little data.

There are times when you have 60% of the data and you have to make a decision. There are times when you have 30% data and you have to make a decision.

The difference between 30% and 60% is a lot. In fact, most entrepreneurs I deal with confuse having 3% of data with 30% of data.

To reduce clustering illusion the only remedy is to get more data. You will have to run more, smaller, experiments, over smaller periods of time and do it consistently. Make your assumptions, document your hypothesis, but continue to work on getting more data.

Turns out the real problem for our entrepreneur was that the overall market was much smaller, and they found it after 1 year of trying to increase their virality coefficient. They did raise their initial funding, but have since pivoted to expand their merchandise offerings to cater to a larger market.

Funding

Don’t apologize if you are building a life style business or a slow growth one

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I had a friend come over to meet local investors and members this week to talk about his startup. It is a good company with very early traction. They are clearly not going to be a Unicorn in anytime soon.

The amazing part was he was not even looking for investment or money. He was seeking support and had a very nebulous but simple ask – get one person to lead the Seattle chapter of his startup and be the local champion to host events and hackathons.

Naturally, to an audience of seasoned investors and entrepreneurs, this seemed to be a small ask. There were a barrage of questions about “Why not do a bigger thing?”, “What is the market size?”, etc. Not withstanding the fact that his startup was already “in the market” with some meaningful traction. The entrepreneur was not looking to “Go Big or Go Home”, but really make a difference and also make some money.

In this market, where most everyone wants to invest in social networking applications that share real time video or a social network for dog lovers, he was building a different kind of company.

It was clear that he was not being able to tell his story and the impact his organization was making, since he was unable to convince most folks that what he was doing was material.

It would be a collective insult to the intellect of the room, if we did not support his cause actually or come up with ideas to help the entrepreneur.

When he was asked these important, but tangential questions, he chose to apologize. Many of his answers were “Yeah, we dont have that”, or “We only do this one small part” or “We have not had that level of impact yet”.

Surprisingly he had more impact on young kids and women in other regions, than I suspect 97% of the people in the room.

Yet, he was the one who was apologizing.

As an entrepreneur, you set out with a vision to change the world, however small. Sometimes you just have a small problem you want to solve. You wont even understand in most cases, the unintended consequences of your product or startup.

Never mind.

Just dont apologize to any self-righteous, unicorn chasing investor.

Tell your story, stick to your convictions and be humble, but stand up to criticism about the market you chose, or the growth you have had. Even if they chose not invest, remember that it is easier to throw rocks than to collect them and build a house.

Keep collecting all the rocks thrown at you. You will need them to build your house made of solid rock.

Until then, please dont apologize.